Flipkart – A Walmart-owned e-commerce company has ventured into the sector of quick commerce with a new business called Minutes. The service is now live in some of the regions of Bengaluru, making it a rival player for established quick commerce giants like Zepto or Instamart of Swiggy, and Blinkit of Zomato.
The service has been initiated for places including HSR Layout, Gunjur, Bellandur, and Kadubeesanahalli, some of the heavily populated residential and Information Technology (IT) centers with growing demand for quick commerce services. Flipkart is delivering items such as smartphones, electronics, and more to the customer’s doorstep within a period of 10-15 minutes.
It was expected to run about 100 fulfillment centers to assist its entry in quick commerce in the ongoing year’s festive season. Sources suggest that the 15-20-minute delivery system offered by Zepto, Instamart, and Blinkit has diverted the major part of the sale from Flipkart and Amazon.
The strategic move will help Flipkart operate same-day delivery to millions of consumers in over 20 cities including both metro and non-metro cities. Bhubaneshwar, Coimbatore, Guwahati, Indore, Jaipur, Ludhiana, Nagpur, Patna, Raipur, Siliguri, and Vijayawada are some of the latter category cities. This is being expanded by the Bengaluru-based company for Tier-II and Tier-III cities but the quick-commerce initiative is different from this service as the main idea here is to deliver the products much faster.
Hari Kumar G, the VP and head of grocery at Flipkart stated that the company is going for increased grocery services penetration into the metros and is expanding itself in the tier 2 plus cities of Bharat. He added that both quick-commerce and next-day delivery could be implemented simultaneously. The company will consider adopting the quick commerce services in the future depending on the response it observes within specific regions of the country.
This year tech giant Google invested close to $350 million for a minority stake in Flipkart falling under the latter’s $1 billion funding round started in 2023. This fundraise will assist Flipkart to fend off Amazon, upcoming competitors Reliance JioMart and Tata Digital and established quick commerce players Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart.
